Cops, Prosecutor Sued In Flawed Murder Case

December 16, 1999|By Maurice Possley, Tribune Staff Writer.

Two Chicago police detectives and a Cook County assistant state's attorney are being sued for at least $20 million in a claim of malicious prosecution of a teenager who was acquitted of murder earlier this year.

The lawsuit was filed in Cook County Circuit Court on behalf of Rita Grimes and her son, Eddie Huggins, 17, who was indicted on a charge of murdering a woman after a dispute over trading sex for drugs.

Huggins was acquitted in April after a judge could not reconcile the boy's alleged confession that he stabbed the woman with an autopsy that showed no stab wounds.

The suit, filed by attorneys R. Eugene Pincham, Andre Grant, Lewis Myers and Berve Power, seeks damages from the city of Chicago and the Police Department, as well as Detectives Edward Louis and John Turney and prosecutor Caren Armbrust. Also named is Michael Lumpkin, a convicted drug dealer who implicated Huggins in the murder of Lorraine Gates.

"This case represents the epitome of police and prosecutorial misconduct and a violation of the fundamental principles of fairness and freedom," Pincham said after filing the lawsuit. "The police officers knew when they appeared before the grand jury and testified that this girl had no stab wounds and they didn't tell the grand jury there were no stab wounds . . . and then the state prosecuted this kid and kept him in custody for 15 months. It's terrible what they did."

Pat Camden, a police spokesman, said the department would not comment on the pending case. Marcy O'Boyle, spokeswoman for State's Atty. Richard Devine, also declined to comment.

The suit alleges that Louis and Turney intimidated and coerced Huggins into confessing to the murder and that Armbrust prosecuted the case despite serious questions about Huggins' innocence and about whether Lumpkin was the true killer.

Lumpkin is in the Pontiac Correctional Center on a 4-year sentence for robbery, theft and narcotics dealing, and is scheduled to be released Aug. 15.

Lumpkin has denied in an interview that he killed Gates.

Gates, 25, was found on Jan. 15, 1998, lying in a pool of blood in a vacant third floor apartment at 7352 N. Hoyne Ave.

A few hours after the discovery, Lumpkin, 19, was arrested on a charge of selling narcotics and, according to police, implicated Huggins, then 15, in the murder.

Huggins was brought in for questioning and, according to police, confessed after several hours of interrogation, to stabbing Gates, a convicted prostitute, in the mouth.

However, several hours later, an autopsy performed by the Cook County medical examiner's office determined Gates died of blunt trauma; no stab wounds were present.

The case against Huggins was controversial almost from the start, prompting allegations by the defense of both a coerced confession and intimidation of witnesses. Details of the case suggested that a hasty investigation had been conducted that relied on a confession rather than on physical evidence.

A Tribune investigation published in March detailed how Huggins had spent more than a year in the county's juvenile detention center awaiting trial on murder charges, even though police were informed five hours after his alleged confession that Gates' body bore no stab wounds.

During that year, Huggins' first lawyer, Anthony J. Basile, never conducted his own investigation. He did not interview witnesses or file any motions challenging the state's case. The Tribune report prompted Pincham and Grant to take over Huggins' case.

In acquitting Huggins April 29, Judge Thomas Sumner, in a stinging rebuke of the case brought by police and prosecutors, said no physical evidence tied Huggins to the murder.

Sumner also suggested that law enforcement authorities had lost sight of their duty.

"Sometimes in this system--in this process we have which is presumed to ferret out the truth--the truth gets obscured in the process of winning and losing," Sumner said.